It is obvious, from what has been said about the structure of our habitual representations of other individuals, that our ordinary representation of ourselves will be tinged with that mass of error which we have found to be connected with single acts of introspection, recollections of past personal experience, and illusory single expectations of future personal experiences.

How large an opening for erroneous conviction here presents itself can only be understood by a reference to certain deeply fixed impulses and feelings connected with, the very consciousness of self, and favouring what I have marked off as active illusion.

I shall try to show very briefly that each man's intuitive persuasion of his own powers, gifts, or importance--in brief, of his own particular value, contains, from the first, a palpable ingredient of active illusion.
Most persons, one supposes, have with more or less distinct consciousness framed a notion of their own value, if not to the world generally, at least to themselves.

And this notion, however undefined it may be, is held to with a singular tenacity of belief.

The greater part of mankind, indeed, seem never to entertain the question whether they really possess points of excellence.